Ask Lemmy

I work in health care, one of our delayed young patients needs urgent surgery for their condition. I called them because the surgeon's secretary tried to contact them several times re getting them in next week without success, and the parent told me they didn't want the surgery because they were certain that the surgeon would do "extra" procedures, which in their mind meant the patient would be given the COVID and flu vaccines while under anesthesia against their will. The doctor called them and explained that the patient needs it very badly and that nothing else would happen, so they reluctantly agreed, but they still called me yesterday fussing about this idea. I explained that there were several people in the OR for the procedure, not just the surgeon but nurses and residents and the anesthesiologist, and that none of them particularly wanted to lose their professional license doing something they didn't consent to even if for some reason the surgeon thought that stealth vaccinating the child was a good idea.

Um, surgeons don't consider it their job to secretly vaccinate people. In my decades of health care work I've only seen one technically unconsented patient because otherwise they would lose their limb and die of sepsis, and were so unable to respond to discussion about it and they had no next of kin or SDM, that the decision had to be made as life or death, because a pit bull mauled them so badly and ripped off a limb. (Sadly they lost the limb anyway). Surgeons really don't want to do that, and they sure as hell don't want to also stealth vaccinate crazy people.